But what I really like is his short follow up, in which he (gasp!) admits that, yes, he has exchanged an email or two with Kirchick regarding the story.

Yes, gentle reader, it’s true. Often reporters in the same city—even reporters who have quite different political views—will be at least passing acquaintances, and give each other heads-ups on stories that are about to appear that might be relevant to the other’s work. It’s a shadowy network so far ranging that you’ll notice that it actually reveals itself even in the coverage of stories having nothing to do with Ron Paul. Spooky, no?

I often get the sense that there’s a perception that Beltway journalists and ideological advocates of various stripes are literally at war with the opposition, as if when a National Review writer runs into someone from Mother Jones at a bar, they text their gangs for backup, whip out knives, and start circling each other in low, crouched stances. But while there are certainly personal rivalries and squabbles, and it’s fairly typical to see someone with a friend circle weighted toward folks who espouse similar ideologies, there’s also a fair bit of comity in Washington. It’s not like West Side Story, or the WWF (though I could certainly support the creation of BloggingCageMatches.com). No, perhaps sadly, the various ideological divisions are generally not analogous to the Crips and the Bloods, although I do recall overhearing a story (which I can’t at all confirm, but hey, this is the blogosphere) about The Weekly Standard staff taking on the folks from The American Prospect in a paintball game. Brutal!

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I often get the sense that there’s a perception that Beltway journalists and ideological advocates of various stripes are literally at war with the opposition

That’s strange, as the general critique has been precisely the opposite for at least a couple of decades. In the blogosphere (OK, at Eschaton), you see references to the Village, or the cocktail party circuit, etc., and the criticism predates the blogosphere by quite a bit.

My exposure to the criticism has been mostly from the left and center left, so perhaps the criticisms are different on the right. That might make a certain sense, given the broader critique that the media is liberal. That might mean that explicitly right journalists are more likely to initially see themselves as in opposition to the left, and to maintain that belief. Dunno.

William F. Buckley, Jr. used to throw down with Murray Kempton, and a few times with Jack Kerouac in the mid-Forties when they had mutual friends in school uptown. Not that Kerouac was really Buckley’s ideological opponent, but I don’t have time to get into that here.